First associated with Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, it gained prominence when the tradition of
courtly love thrived in later centuries.
Cliff and Sally's unconventional relationship contrasts with the more
courtly love that blossoms between "Cabaret's" secondary couple.
Very few people know this, but the day was first associated with romance in the 14th century, within the circle of author and philosopher Geoffrey Chaucer, when the tradition of
courtly love flourished.
Valentine's Day is a day for lovers, based on the feast of a saint believed to have lived in the third century and associated with
courtly love but whose historicity is so nebulous the Church removed him from the General Roman Calendar in 1969, leaving his liturgical celebration to local calendars.
Other topics include instructional books on civility, war and the codifying of violence, classic knowledge and
courtly love, and knights and religion.
In Austen's exploration of the moral dangers that
courtly love presents to women, she reverses the gender roles by having the fair lady show the submissive service traditionally performed by the knight.
That view stands in sharp contrast to, say, that of Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, which is indifferent to Trojan history because it is more concerned with
courtly love than with military history.
The archaic world of
courtly love and the contemporary youth culture of hip-hop converge in the compulsion to rhyme: "Dude, if you had a quarter / of my built in dolor / there be virtue in my briar." But Keelan's modern, English-speaking trobairitz do not replicate the ironic awareness she ascribes to "the essential fictionality of their subjective position.
AMUSEUM is marking Valentine's Day by opening up 19th century books depicting cupid and
courtly love.
The sixth and most exciting chapter shows how the movement to legalize divorce and anxieties about the state of marriage led to attempts by doctors to advocate a form of
courtly love in marriage to obviate the need for divorce (in ironic contradistinction to the adulterous nature of codified
courtly love as exemplified by Lancelot and Guinevere's paradigmatic extramarital passion).
The day first became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the High Middle Ages, when the tradition of
courtly love flourished.
